4 ms·

Good point. In fact, you and I should go looking for missing children right now. If there's any chance at all, it's worth doing, right?

• tomjakubowski 14y ago
  There is significant opportunity cost in dropping everything to search for missing children. There is practically no opportunity cost in changing a 404 page.
  • wpietri 14y ago
    not so sure about that. With 404 pages, a user was trying to do something, and it's pretty much guaranteed that it wasn't looking for pictures of stolen children. A task-irrelevant interruption increases the likelihood that they give up or get thrown off task, and certainly delays task completion. A 404 page is an especially bad time to distract users because they're already in the weeds. Were I wanting to use a site to help search for missing children, I'd probably just devote some of the ad units to it.
    • glhaynes 14y ago
      Additionally, it induces anxiety/sadness/etc in lots of people. Some can apparently just tune it out, but some are significantly emotionally affected by this kind of thing.